“I have lived with several Zen masters — all of them cats.”  Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightment

“To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one’s family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one’s own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.”  Buddha

Here we come again to a conversation about the mind. The mind is truly a wondrous and mysterious thing. We are learning more and more about the mind every year. For example, scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the University of Southern California (USC) have demonstrated the successful implementation of a prosthetic system that uses a person’s own memory patterns to facilitate the brain’s ability to encode and recall memory. In the pilot study, published in today’s Journal of Neural Engineering, scientists were able to show an almost 40% improvement of a participants’ short-term memory performance. “This is the first time scientists have been able to identify a patient’s own brain cell code or pattern for memory and, in essence, ‘write in’ that code to make existing memory work better, an important first step in potentially restoring memory loss,” said Robert Hampson, Ph.D., professor of physiology/pharmacology and neurology at Wake Forest Baptist.

The study focused on improving episodic memory, which is the most common type of memory loss in people with Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and head injury. Episodic memory is information that is new and useful for a short period of time, such as where you parked your car on any given day.  The researchers recorded the neural patterns or ‘codes’ while the study participants were performing a computerized memory task. The patients were shown a simple image, such as a color block, and after a brief delay where the screen was blanked, were then asked to identify the initial image out of four or five on the screen. The USC team led by Theodore Berger, Ph.D., and Dong Song, Ph.D., analyzed the recordings from the correct responses and synthesized a code for correct memory performance. The Wake Forest Baptist team played back that code to the patients while they performed the image recall task. In this test, the patients’ episodic memory performance showed a 37 percent improvement over baseline. (information in this devotion was obtained from sciencedaily.com, March 27, 2018, Source:Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center)

Our overall health is influenced by all sorts of factors, including the health of our brains. The busier we are, the older we get, and the more stress we encounter in our lives, the more our brains work to keep all of the information we encounter every day in some sort of order. It is easy to become forgetful. As such, we all need time to relax, to refresh, to recharge – if for no other reason than to do some “data dumping” from our brains. Jesus always found time alone and away to pray – and to refresh. He sought that time for his disciples as well. It is a model we all should follow.

Pastor Dave